Seattle is Dying has always been their cry.

How else can the dying MSM keep the scared old people glued to their news fear if they can't scare you over and over and over.

Must add graphics, add in fires, make it look worse by tight shots and added darker skin have to make the ever vanishing old white people keep watching out of fear ...

"A homeless crisis caused by an obvious lack of really affordable housing exploded like never before." Charles I like the post but can we stop the narrative that the number one cause of homelessness is high rents? Its Fentanyl #1 #2 & #3. You can give a junkie an apartment for $200 a month in rent and he would still be on the streets

@4 Absolutely correct. The progressives are the ones who wrecked their own agenda through their complete disregard for the deaths of those addicted to drugs, and the deaths of those who were killed by the addicted or their dealers.

@2, x 1000% CHOP/CHAZ happened, and like most political experiments, voters moderate. That’s it.

"Cities went sharply to the right because real solutions were not politically unavailable." Charles, I appreciate a well-executed double negative, but this one seems inadvertent. Or am I missing a deeper intended meaning? If so please elaborate in a future column.

Otherwise, I'm pretty much in accord. The political pendulum swung far to the left in reaction to the George Floyd murder, then far to the right (for Seattle) in reaction to the subsequent chaos (much though not all of it orchestrated from above), and will likely regress to the mean in this year's elections. We're probably not going to elect any more Ann Davisons right away. But extreme and worsening inequality coupled with intensifying white cis het male backlash guarantee that any moment of restored equilibrium will be short. The late '00s/early '10s are sadly never coming back.

@5 this is closest to the truth. What we all got a glimpse of was the socialist paradise those on the left have been pushing for come into reality in CHOP and like all socialist experiments it soon devolved into anarchy, tyranny and finally murder. Voters rightly decided they had enough of the progressive left and when a choice between going more extreme (thanks to Stranger endorsed NTK) and moderating presented itself, moderation won. I suspect that trend will continue this year with Sawant, Herbold, Mosqueda and possibly Morales leaving the council. Hopefully that pause will allow us to start developing real solutions to our problems instead of progressive, socialist fantasies.

CHOP/CHAZ = Lord of the Flies.
@5 completely agree.

@15 -- the council had nothing to do with the monorail boondoggle (which was aggressively supported by The Stranger!). It was passed -- and eventually canceled -- entirely by ballot initiative. And SLU could be an enormous park right now, but instead the voters turned down a ballot initiative to do that.

Put the blame for these issues where it belongs: the public, not the council.

"a city that, in 2013, elected a hardcore socialist and a number of unrepentant progressives. How did we get from there to a Republican city prosecutor? "

I know!

Despite his flaws, most people assumed the incumbent, Holmes, was going to win easily. As a result, relatively weak candidates ran against him.

The Stranger endorsed Nicole Thomas-Kennedy (NTK). The Seattle Times endorsed Davison. Holmes lost the primary (the race was fairly close). Then it came out that NTK had tweeted in support of arson. Apparently The Stranger hadn't done their homework before endorsing her. So Seattle had to choose between a very bad left-wing candidate, or a law-and-order Republican. The Republican, it should be noted, was endorsed by many Democrats (NTK also had endorsements). Seattle chose what they considered to the lesser of two evils: Davison.

The Stranger's endorsement of NTK is the biggest reason Davison got elected. Without that, Holmes would still be in office.

@17: Or, the policies enacted by “a hardcore socialist and a number of unrepentant progressives” all turned out to be miserable failures, and so the voters simply elected different candidates? Isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work?

@11 Sixty-three million people voted for Trump in 2016. In 2020 that figure was 74 million. Do I really have to explain further?

@19: Trump lost the popular vote both times.

This article is a parody, right?

@3 No matter how often this narrative is repeated it does not cease to be ludicrous. The increasingly dire homelessness crisis so clearly tracks the explosion in the cost of housing in many US cities it really could not be any more obvious what the cause is, whereas I am pretty sure drug addiction existed long before our glorious drug war created the perfect conditions for fentanyl (which is certainly a way cheaper high than heroin or even crack anyway) to become ubiquitous.

There’s a difference between civil disobedience and violent chaos. For many of us CHOP blew past that line on its way toward anarchy. We want police to enforce the law without regard for race. We want to house the homeless. We reject the piety of advocates who insist the perfect SAD solution must be in place before public spaces can be reclaimed. We prefer pragmatic, incremental public policies that bend toward justice. We distrust those who say they know the truth/righteous solutions wherever they are on the political spectrum.

CHOP was highly educational: a visceral demonstration of the effectiveness of the principles espoused by its revolutionary architects when applied to real-world governance. "See how this little six-block area is running? That's how we'd like to run the whole city!"

Voters took the exact lesson from this that one would expect them to.

@8, you think we're not going to elect any more Ann Davisons? Just wait until the results of the City Council elections in November. And @3, the crisis of homelessness existed many years before the fentanyl crisis. What fentanyl caused was a horrible rise in homeless deaths.

@25: Correlation does not imply cause, and you’re disrespecting the lived experiences of the homeless themselves. In Seattle’s Homeless Needs Assessment, majorities of the homeless persons surveyed clearly stated they used alcohol and other drugs, had arrived in Seattle already unemployed, already homeless — and, crucially against your housing-cost argument — they revealed they could not have afforded rent in Seattle at any time over the previous twenty years. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3480319-City-of-Seattle-Homeless-Needs-Assessment-March.html)

Seattle’s homelessness crisis was never about locals losing their homes. It is an influx of already-homeless drug users.

“The feeling that officers are leaving the SPD in droves is structured by this event,”

If only there was some way to check on whether this feeling was correct or not. Say, if figures were publicly available on the number of persons employed as SPD officers over time. By running such numbers, we could decide if these feelings were just useless leftovers from years ago, or a serious concern for residents of Seattle now.

What we’d need is someone who writes a lot about economics and employment to analyze some labor statistics. Sadly, the Stranger seems to have no writers with this skill set, so I guess we are indeed left with mere feelings.

@29: Charles and @1 like to sneer at the “(media-generated) fear” which supposedly scared Seattle’s voters into electing a Republican for the first time in decades, but so long as lawless encampments continue generating endless thefts and assaults to procure drugs, Seattle’s citizens will continue wanting laws against such crimes enforced.

"CHOP was about one thing: dead Black people."
Never thought I'd say it Charles, but you are absolutely right.

The deaths of Antonio Mays Jr. and Horace Lorenzo Anderson Jr. prove you are 100% spot-on with that statement.

That's probably not what you meant to do, though. My sincere condolences.

Charles - the affordable housing false narrative continues by you and Stranger. It's a drug problem, not a housing affordable problem. You can give them free rent and the drug addicts will ruin the housing area for real people who are truly trying to become drug-free and employable. They need to be arrested for public drug use, and placed in a facility where they can harm innocent pregnant, Seattle locals. If they really get clean and follow the rules the arrest can be expunged. I know the bleeding hearts can't handle this humane treatment. But the alternative is crushing the city and its hard-working people. The molly moons of the world want protection but whine about how the process of protection works. Can't have it both ways